Brief Journey For an Icon Of the Attack On New York

By ERIC KONIGSBERG

Published: October 6, 2006

First, they hoisted it above the ground with a 40-ton cherry picker. After that, four or five men set about removing the residue from the previous welding job at the base, each of them taking a turn with a blowtorch, so that it could be securely mounted to a pedestal at its future home.

That was, at just after 8 in the morning, the initial preparation work for a three-block journey along Church Street that would come in the afternoon. Not such a great distance, even for something as difficult to move as a chunk of steel that weighs 6,000 pounds, give or take, but this particular piece of steel and this particular transition had taken on a good deal of significance to a good number of people.

That steel is the cross-shaped beams discovered on Sept. 13, 2001, amid the ruins of 6 World Trade Center. About 18 feet tall, one of the construction workers estimated, and perhaps half as wide, the cross was, to nobody's objection, being moved from ground zero to a location outside St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church, on Barclay Street.

That step was necessary to make way for construction on the east side of the trade center site. The World Trade Center Memorial Foundation has promised to eventually provide a permanent home for the cross, most likely at the World Trade Center Memorial Museum, which is to open in 2009.

But if not for some arm-twisting and noisemaking on the part of the Rev. Brian Jordan, an enterprising Franciscan friar, and Frank Silecchia, the Local 731 laborer who first unearthed the cross, it would be on its way, like many of the other artifacts from the site, to cold storage in Hangar 17 at Kennedy International Airport, courtesy of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Instead, at 2 p.m., the cross, covered in rust and chained to an 18-wheel flatbed, was hauled up a sloping driveway out of the trade center site and onto Church Street, at the corner of Liberty Street.

Tourists and office workers, drawn to the site in full force by clear skies and the midday sun, their curiosity piqued by the presence of television cameras, began to gather behind the truck. The mood was solemn but the noise level was anything but funereal.

Father Jordan, in his brown friar's robes and Birkenstock sandals, led a procession of about 150 people, among them ground zero workers, relatives of some of those killed in the attack, ''uniformed personnel,'' as he called them, and some of the onlookers. There were executives in suits and brush-cut union workers with windbreakers over their neckties.

During the journey, brief as it was, Mr. Silecchia and Father Jordan described their battle to keep the cross outside, where it could be seen.

''No hangar, no hangar, no hangar,'' Mr. Silecchia said, characterizing his initial reaction to the Port Authority's plan, which he had learned of last April.

Mr. Silecchia was part of the debris-removal team. He said that he found working in the presence of the cross ''uplifting and spiritual.'' Throughout the 10-month cleanup process, he and other workers said, the cross, which stood near the edge of the site, was a destination to which they repaired during coffee breaks and on Sundays, when Father Jordan began celebrating Mass.

''It gave a lot of people a place to go when they were trying to make sense of the work all of us were doing,'' said Charlie Vitchers, a general superintendent who oversaw both the cleanup operation and yesterday's relocation.

The Port Authority's plan to store the cross in a hangar had upset many ground zero workers, as well as relatives of some victims.

''I think what it was, in fairness to Port Authority, was a kind of miscommunication among themselves,'' Father Jordan said. ''There are a lot of memorial and rebuilding projects on everybody's minds. Politics was involved and also big business was involved, and the cross wasn't that important to them.''

Father Jordan, whose own parish, Saint Francis of Assisi Roman Catholic Church, is on West 32nd Street, persuaded the authority to agree not to send ''the artifact,'' as he often calls it, to Kennedy.

More difficult, according to Mr. Silecchia, was finding a church willing to hold onto it until 2009. Then Father Jordan spoke with the Rev. Kevin V. Madigan, the pastor of St. Peter's, who was happy to provide a temporary home.

When the cross reached Barclay Street yesterday afternoon, it was lifted into position by the crane. Two members of the original ground zero team, Gene Flood and Warren Allen, both ironworkers from Local 40, moved swiftly to bolt it into place.

Father Madigan blessed the cross and shook holy water on it. Officials spoke.

Finally, Andrew Macchio, a retired sanitation worker with a rich baritone, came to the front of the crowd and led everybody in a rendition of ''God Bless America.''

Photos: The cross made of steel beams that was taken from ground zero yesterday arrived at St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church. It will remain there temporarily. (Photo by Librado Romero/The New York Times)(pg. B1); Two passers-by, Elena Lagalante and Antonio Felyz, watched as the cross from the wreckage of the World Trade Center was removed from ground zero yesterday, to be temporarily stored at a nearby church. (Photo by Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press); (Photo by Librado Romero/The New York Times)(pg. B5)